January 2023
Michaela Ružičková & Monika Jakábová, Infosecurity.sk
Summary
Infosecurity.sk, in cooperation with the International Republican Institute’s Beacon Project, monitored posts in the Slovak-language Facebook space concerning the European Green Deal as well as those containing themes and prevailing sentiments about broader energy-related topics such as climate change, the environment, and energy. The research was conducted using the CrowdTangle tool between May 1 and September 30, 2022. This monitoring is part of a larger IRI initiative implemented simultaneously in five EU countries.
Key findings:
- As part of the research, we analyzed the content of 1,853 relevant posts. The most prevalent topic was energy (1,068 posts were tagged "energy"), followed by the economy (686 posts), and the environment (544 posts).
- There was a clear overlap between the topics of energy and the economy. Both topics occurred at very similar rates in the same time periods. They were dominant in the period from the beginning of July to the end of July 2022, and from the end of August to the end of September 2022. Among the 20 sources that received the highest number of impressions on the analyzed posts, there were seven politicians, six pro-Russian Facebook pages, four mainstream media sources, and two pages of political parties.
- Few sources communicated Green Deal-related topics during the period under study, with only a minimum of interactions in total. However, the posts were more likely to engage positive or neutral sentiment rather than negative sentiment. Relevant actors, such as EU institutions and their branches in Slovakia, published most of them. Slovak political actors published only a limited number of posts on the topic.
- Another theme was the EU's effort to diversify energy sources to make the union less dependent on energy supplies from Russia. The majority of narratives surrounding this topic portrayed the EU as a "Russophobic" organization.
- Out of 401 EU-focused posts (21.5% of all analyzed posts), we identified 188 with a negative sentiment (46.9%) and 66 with a positive sentiment (16.5%).
- The energy crisis resonated in the Slovak information space during the monitored period, which was associated with a strong pro-Russian sentiment. A total of 188 posts containing pro-Russian sentiment appeared in the dataset (10.1% of all analyzed posts). The timing of these posts largely coincided with the distribution of posts containing the tags "energy" and "economy."
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This report has been prepared with support from IRI’s Beacon Project. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of IRI.